The Romantic Potential of Sabine and Ezra
By João Guilherme Fidelis
INTRODUCTION
If you ask Star Wars fans what is the nature of Ezra Bridger and Sabine Wren’s relationship, you’ll get many different answers. Everybody agrees that Kanan Jarrus and Hera Syndulla are the space parents, but not everyone agrees that Ezra and Sabine are space siblings. Even though Dave Filoni, one of the creators of Star Wars Rebels, has stated after the show’s finale that it was important to show girls and boys being friends and has written Ezra saying Sabine is like a sister to him in the first episode of Ahsoka, there are many fans who believe there is still a lot of romantic potential between these characters with reason.
Before I tackle how Ahsoka has presented a potentially epic romantic set up, we need to go back where Sabezra started: Rebels. If there is something really interesting in Filoni’s quote about their relationship is this: “And I think it’s very strong at this point to show boys and girls being friends in supportive of one another.” I don’t know what he exactly meant by “at this point”, it could mean the age we live in or he could be talking about at that point of the story. I’ll stick with the latter for obvious reasons. It doesn’t really shut down the romance between the characters, it just means that Rebels was not the moment he could’ve done it because he needed to forge their friendship first.
REBELS
Rebels does a wonderful job on developing Sabine and Ezra’s friendship, but not without some shipp teasing like some people believe. It all starts when they meet each other and she lets him escape with one of the crates she needed to accomplish her mission because she is very impressed with the kid’s skills. As soon as he sees her helmetless, he is speechless and flirts her, which makes her roll her eyes at him. For a lot of people, this is where the shipp dies.
Sabine finds him annoying, so that must be the end of it. I’d argue it’s the contrary. Later in the episode, Sabine and Ezra finally have a proper conversation. They start discovering similarities between them such as their dislike for following orders and the suffering of their families because of the Empire. The scene ends with Sabine telling him her name with a smile on her face.
Season 1 is often seen by fandom as the season that shows Sabine doesn’t like Ezra that much, but upon my two rewatches of the show, I realized this is not true at all. Empire Day and Gathering Forces are very interesting episodes that really showcase how fond Sabine is of Ezra. It’s when I started sensing the potential between the two if I’m being honest. The episode begins with Zeb, Hera and Sabine walking into a bar, but before she gets there, the young Mandalorian stops and removes her helmet to watch Ezra training with Kanan. Whether she is interested in the Jedi ways or simply likes watching the boy is unknown, but I gravitate towards the latter due to how the rest of the arc is written.
Kanan’s lesson to Ezra in this storyline is quite interesting: He wants his padawan to attach to others and that’s exactly what Sabine does throughout it. In this moment of the show, Ezra has a lot of revelations about his past and she notices he is not okay. Next time the two talk, it feels like a spiritual sequel to their conversation in the first episode, this time Sabine asks him to reconciliate with Tseebo, the man who should have taken care of him when his parents were captured. Hera commands her to go the gunner, but Sabine is determined to ignore that until Ezra makes the choice of talking to him. Once again, she risks the mission for being fond of Ezra. Even more interesting is how by the end of Gathering Forces, Sabine delivers Ezra a birthday gift she made to cheer him up: A holo image of his parents. Sabine, like what Kanan was trying to teach the boy, attaches to him, allows herself to make a connection with him.
The effort of making a gift to cheer up the boy she watched training sounds like a romantic set up to me. This is when I started questioning the fandom’s reasoning about how Sabine definitely doesn’t have feelings for Ezra. After this scene, all I could see was a girl who doesn’t quite understand that she adores him and who will never admit it. We see in the next seasons that she does not like to talk about personal stuff. There are a lot of arguments about why she didn’t give a chance to Ezra for a relationship then. It’s a fun speculation for sure, some say she prefers girls and that’s fine, but to me, it becomes clear why in the episode Idiot’s Array.
In Idiot’s Array, Ezra, jealous of Lando Calrissian, points out that he praised months ago. Sabine complains that he didn’t know why her art was cool and Lando adds that Bridger is a boy with no experience of the galaxy. In fact, he makes that point twice throughout the episode. It feels like the show is implying the reason why Sabine and Ezra are not together is because he is too much of a kid for her. In Path of the Jedi, that happens right before the episode with Calrissian, one of Ezra’s fears is that Sabine pities him and sees him as a kid.
So many fans argue Ezra learns how to see Sabine as his equal because he stops hitting on her after season 2. I argue otherwise. Ezra does say at the end of Idiot’s that he realy appreciates Sabine and this is never contradicted by the show. Plenty of scenes in the third season show he still thinks she is the coolest girl, such as in Trials of the Darksaber when he is speechless with the way she retrieves the blade to fight Kanan, or in Legacy of Mandalore when he tells proudly to her mother that Sabine held her own against Gar Saxon, or when he says something along the lines “These guys are screwed now” when she arrives blasting stormtroopers in the air.
In the other hand, Sabine does change the way she treats him. She does the journey of going from calling him “kid” to start calling him “Ezra”. It’s a huge difference. She stops being the girl who will always be older than him and starts becoming his partner. It’s incredible the focus their relationship receive from season 3 and on. It indeed got more interesting once he stopped hitting on her, because as I pointed out before, his appreciation for her did not disappear, it simply matured.
They got closer. They became a unity. Their friendship blossomed and it became the perfect foundation for a romance. Operation Shadowstrike shows how deeply concerned he is about her, wishing he had gone in the undercover mission instead, worrying about her safety too much to the point Kanan has to tell him to calm down. Sure, Ezra was going through his dark side phase in that season, but when you consider his relationship with Sabine since the beginning, it says a lot.
In the last season of the show, Filoni and the other writers start building up the mood for a goodbye for both Kanan and Ezra, the master and the apprentice. In order to do this, they deepened Kanan’s relationship with Hera and Ezra’s relationship with Sabine. Even though one is explicitly romantic and the other at this point is platonic, structurally, Sabezra really parallels Kanera. The focus Hera receive on her grief towards the love of her life is the same focus Sabine receive on hers towards her long-lost friend after the show. Beyond this, there are another parallels between the two pairings that are just impossible to ignore.
Some visual, others in the text, such as Ezra fumbling at meeting Sabine’s dad in Heroes of Mandalore Part 1 just like Kanan also fumbled at meeting Hera’s. If Ezra parallels Kanan, then Sabine parallels Hera because they both have a complicated history with their families. The parallels between the two shipps didn’t start in season 4 though. Back to Idiot’s Array, both Kanan and Ezra express their dislike for Lando and the boy tries to tell Sabine how he feels by observing the way his master talks to Hera.
AHSOKA
5 years after the end of Rebels, Filoni continues his story in Ahsoka. Right off the bat, in Part 1 — Master and Apprentice, the writer seems not so interested in a romance between the characters by having Ezra say in the holomessage he made especially for her that they are NOT REALLY family, but she’s like a sister to him. Many fans read this as the canonical death of the ship and it might be. Maybe these are the author’s true intentions for them, or maybe not. Misdirection is a thing in romantic storylines. It would be interesting if Ezra lied about how he feels about her so he could spare her from suffering more than she already would. It would be really dramatic if something like this was revealed this in future seasons and easy to believe considering how Rebels already showed us MULTIPLE times that Ezra has a crush on her.
However, Ezra is barely in Ahsoka. It’s Sabine’s time to shine as the protagonist and oh boy, does this show makes the idea of a romance between them even more interesting and far more appropriate now because of her arc in it. Instead of keeping things the way they were in Rebels epilogue, Filoni made some changes to it. Instead of a very confident Sabine who is in peace protecting Lothal for Ezra, he gives us a Sabine who let her hair grow because she is too depressed without her friend Ezra Bridger. The purge of Mandalore is mentioned twice in the show, but his name? It pops up all the time.
Hera knows Sabine will only help Ahsoka if it is to find Ezra. Ryder knows she will be interested on hearing her former master because it involves Ezra. Ahsoka has her share of moments where she is worried that Sabine is thinking too much about Ezra and not the mission. The scene where she goes to Sabine’s room and sees that her former apprentice has been watching Ezra’s recording really echoes a mom finding out her daughter has a crush on someone. Ahsoka even says she knows how much Ezra means to her and Sabine gives her silence. In Part 6 — Far, Far Away, she even questions whether Sabine did what she did for herself.
It’s not only the good guys who comment on her devotion towards Ezra. The bad guys too. Baylan says: “Her focus to find Ezra Bridger blinds her.” a line that definitely echoes “So love has blinded you?” from Revenge of The Sith (The parallels between Anakin and Sabine are intentional) and Thrawn, our big bad, teases her: “Ah yes, the desire to be reunited with your long lost friend.” and even him, who is well aware of how close the two characters are, is confused as to why she would risk the entire galaxy for Ezra.
Sabine handing over the map to Baylan is the most interesting scene in the show. It is as if we are decyphering another layer of her character. A hidden layer. When the former temple-trained Jedi knight reads her mind, he reveals: “I know you feel that Ezra Bridger is the only family you have left.” First, I’d like to point out that the term family doesn’t exactly stops romance. In “Avatar: The Last Airbender”, Katara tells Aang she is his family now, then they become a couple. In Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster game-changer “The Dark Knight.” Harvey Dent refers to Rachel Dawson as his family and they were dating before her tragic death. You see, family can be more the defined roles of a nuclear structure.
Second, Baylan’s line confused some fans because Hera, Chopper, Zeb and Jacen, all members of Sabine’s found family are still alive, but this is why it’s important to analysis the text. Baylan does not affirm Ezra is the only family she has left. He says she feels that way, and that’s worth interrogating. Why does Sabine believe that? It’s not like Hera did something bad to her, we would have already known by now. Same thing for Zeb.
It can’t be because of how they wronged her, it could be because each of them live their different lives now, but even that wouldn’t make her suddenly feel they are no longer her family, so why the hell her friend who is in another galaxy is the only she feels closer to. What makes Ezra different from Hera and Zeb, people she know for a longer time than him? Does she believe he won’t move on from her? Why does she believe that? It feels like the show is acknowledging that Sabine’s bond with Ezra is very different from her bond with the rest of the team. It feels like they are saying she feels incomplete without him, that they are soulmates.
There are even more layers to this whole scene. Six years ago, when Rebels ended, we were led to believe that the mission was simply bring Ezra home, but when Baylan tempts Sabine by saying: “You will be reunited with your friend.” it feels like the show is inviting the viewer to question the true nature of the operation. Not only this, but it also invites you to think for the first time in the show about what Sabine wants for herself, about her personal desire.
Believe me, there is a difference between bringing someone home and wanting to be reunited with someone. One say you want to be at a physical place you call home, the other says the place you want to be is someone. Sure, Ezra gets home by the end of the show thanks to her, but who is to say this was what she wanted for herself? It’s not like the show tries to destroy this notion after she gambles billions of lives to see her best friend again.
As I’ve mentioned before, Ahsoka says her apprentice did it for herself and Thrawn uses the word DESIRE to refer to her wanting to be reunited with him. Beyond this, when she finds Ezra (and there is a lot of awkwardness) she doesn’t tell him how she got there. Sure, you could argue that she is afraid he would disapprove, but Filoni not making her invent a lie in order to at least warn her friend about Thrawn’s departure just makes it look like that she wants to stay stuck in that place with him because she has already found her home. Ezra is her home. Ezra is who she wants by her side.
This is where I believe Filoni failed as a storyteller in this show. If the idea that Sabine didn’t bother returning home because she had finally found what she desired for her life was more explicitly presented, her sacrifice to allow Ezra to go home would be than just a mandatory moment of the plot, it would be a Jedi lesson, the fulfillment of Ahsoka’s “Sometimes we have to do what’s right regardless of our personal feelings.”, the ultimate proof that she loves him, the antithesis to Anakin and Padmé.
Season 1 of Ahsoka ends with Tano telling Wren it’s time to move on and if Sabine really had a desire to be reunited with Ezra because she wanted him by her side, we all know that she won’t move on and we’ll probably see her suffering even more for his absence. Filoni set up once again the perfect story about love vs duty and he should come to this realization.
In Across The Spiderverse, Gwen screws up (although unintentionally) universes just because she wanted to hang out with Miles, the boy she is in love with. She hides from him a terrible truth and that ends up disappointing him deeply. I can’t help but see Sabine and Ezra every time I watch this film. It just makes me think that their story is not one of siblings, but of galaxy crossed friends who will become lovers.
Even though Star Wars and the cast had done absolutely nothing yet to promote the shipp, when you take a look at the story, at the parallels, it is the option that makes the most sense. The appeal of Sabezra comes from seeing a girl who doesn’t like to talk about her feelings slowly falling in love with the goofiest boy in the galaxy, it comes from seeing these two characters growing up from teenagers to adults and developing a very strong bond that ends up having galactic consequences. To waste this potential is to waste what can easily become the most impactful romance in the history of Star Wars and that would be really dumb.